Her Story Reviews

  • KinglinkKinglink322,775
    21 Feb 2018
    2 0 0
    Her Story is a little bit of an oddity. It’s a FMV game where the player has access to a police database and needs to find out what happened.

    It’s actually rather good. The whole game is limited to an old-style interface where you’re able to type in words and search for records. I’ve seen a few games that try to emulate old OSes and they lack a feeling of being a working interface. Her Story feels like a proper old computer you’re viewing. Though I immediately turned off the glare filter, it has a great old charm to the aesthetics with it on..

    The meat of Her Story is watching these videos, and this gets into the crux of the big question of “Her Story”. It’s a game that involves watching videos and finding other videos to watch through text typing, mostly searching by keywords.

    So ultimately the question will be asked. “Is this a game?” And it’s a shame it’s reduced to that, but ultimately your goal as a player is to see as much of the story as you want to see, and it’s a rather fantastic story at that. However it can also be dismissed as not having a well-defined win and loss states, and I think that misses the point. There is a specific video you have to see for the game to show you the credits. You can lose the game by not getting that, or giving up part of the way through. It’s like a puzzle game because if you can’t solve puzzle 4-4 you don’t get the ending. The puzzle here, however, is figuring out the keyword you want to use.

    But let’s take a step back from the game question. Her Story is a unique experience, whether it’s a game or not. There’s a number of these interactive stories that aren’t interactive, but Her Story is only really interesting because of the method you use to access the videos. So while a game like God of War or Tomb Raider could be told through a movie, Her Story really only works through the system the game presents.

    It’s not about whether this is a game, but rather is this an experience you’ll enjoy, and if you view it as that, we reach the more interesting point.

    The entire experience is played through finding keywords as mentioned, and it’s mostly about watching fascinating footage of a single actress. The story is good, and I’ll avoid saying more because it’s a story you need to watch with fresh eyes, I’d recommend not looking up too much about the game if you intend to play it. I am trying hard not to include any hint because I enjoyed the discovery so much that I intend to make my wife play it, so she can experience it in the same way.

    The whole keyword system though works because there are dead ends, there are little pieces of information and a couple surprises. When you get the right word you really feel a sense of accomplishment, and when you go down a dead end of information, you feel lost for a moment, and those feelings are excellent.

    The only real issue I had is the game decided I had “finished” the game and I’d argue the full story wasn’t available yet. It’s a shame that the game told me the story was over because there was still meat on the bones, but the good news is the game allowed me to dive back into the archives by saying “I’m not done’ and even after the credits the game was still ready to give me more access and gave me a key phrase that allows me a better access, but not really “full access”.

    That’s the one issue I really have with the game, I’d have liked a “full story” button at the end of the game to see the raw files, or at least see scenes filmed in the game in the correct order. You can do that by looking at the game files, or do it in-game but it’s a hack more than a legit way to view the story.

    However, the story isn’t “complete” and it’s being discussed quite a bit, there’s definitely different interpretations but I am coming around to think the best stories are left open or at least wide enough to have a lively discussion, and Her Story focuses on exactly that, her story. There’s no evidence, there’s no explanation, there’s just videotaped interviews arranged by keyword. While I would have liked a little more, I like the ability to make my own decisions.

    I actually applaud the game loudly for adding a new wrinkle to the discussion of “What is a game?” if you dismiss this as a game the question becomes “What is this?” Because it’s compelling and unique and definitely stands on its own merits.

    It ultimately comes down to this. If you are willing to watch a woman act out a complex story and then have to prod a database to get answers for what’s going on, Her Story will entertain you for a couple hours. If you want action or a real battle of wits, that’s not what you’re going to get here, but it’s a new and innovative way to tell a story. For a price of six dollars, I have to admit, it definitely was worth my purchase.

    It’s not going to be for everyone, but for those who give it a shot and really get involved in the story, it’s going to be discussed for a long time after the final video is viewed.

    If this review has helped you or you want to see what games I would recommend, you can find my Steam curator page at this link.
    http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Revi...
    4.0
  • TheAnomalyTheAnomaly149,385
    05 Dec 2016
    2 0 0
    I can understand why ratings for this game might be mixed, this is some kind of "you love" or "you hate" game.

    But I'll explain why I loved it myself: This FMV (Full motion video) game is very simple but effective. You can compare it to a jigsaw: Videos from police interviews regarding a disappearance have been cut to pieces and you have to find all the pieces and put them together to understand what really happened. To find these pieces, you have to look for terms in a search engine, the first one is given to you. By viewing the part of the interview linked to that search term, you can discover new terms to look for, like names, locations and view more parts to work on...

    Piece after piece, the "picture" (the story) becomes clear. The game is over when you've looked at enough videos to understand the story. It's a very interesting and relaxing game, the scenario is great, the acting is convincing and uncovering the story piece by piece in a random order gives it a lot more interest, you feel a lot more involved in it.

    Regarding achievements, these can be obtained in a few hours by finishing the game and look for the remaining missing pieces. Once you've uncovered all, your completionist needs will be fulfilled.
    4.0
  • Titanium DragonTitanium Dragon154,853
    06 Apr 2016
    2 0 0
    A FMV “video game”, ultimately Her Story is really nothing more than a movie with a very strange interface. This pretty much points to the primary flaw in Her Story, as the actual story being told by the videos is best viewed sequentially, but the interface of the game makes it so that viewing the videos sequentially is extremely unlikely.

    Hannah is the main character of Her Story, and indeed, the only one who shows up in the videos. The central conceit of the game is that Hannah was a murder suspect in 1994, and the protagonist is going through an old police database, wherein the videos are sorted by keywords in their transcripts. This sounds like a clever idea, but in practice, it doesn’t really work very well at all; beyond being very confusing, it suffers from the fact that it is entirely possible to search for the wrong keyword and end up stumbling across the game’s central twist five minutes in.

    Unsurprisingly, I did exactly this by simply searching for the most innocuous of the names I had come across first (for the record, it was the name of one of Hannah’s childhood friends). This resulted in me happening across a video which spoiled the game’s central plot twist, and consequently I spent the rest of the game trying to piece together everything else in the hopes of finding another twist, and then failing to find one.

    The net result of the search interface is that you are likely to watch lots of garbage scenes, with odd scenes which are really important thrown in between them. Some of the videos are nothing more than Hannah saying “no”, while others are minute-long monologues explaining crucial plot or character details.

    Worst of all, if you actually watch the videos in order, they follow the standard variances of a plot; the rise and fall of action as the police officers piece things together before Hannah finally explains exactly what is going on in the final interview. As a movie, it makes sense.

    But as a video game, it makes no sense at all.

    It has other flaws as well – as a murder mystery game, one would think that little details would be pretty important, but as it turns out, the people who made the videos didn’t actually pay much attention to time constraints. On many occaisions, something happens – such as a character changing clothing, or taking a ponygraph – which ignores the necessary setup time, with the videos happening too close together in time. At first, I had assumed that these little mistakes was related to the plot twist, but eventually I realized it was simple laziness on the part of the game creators.

    If the plot was actually viewed in order, it might be passable, though the awkward interface of the game still would make it annoying. And if parts had been locked off until you had figured some stuff out, it might have worked. But as-is, the thing is kind of a mess, and while the central idea wasn’t a bad one, the UI and erratic pacing as a result of it being made into a “game” (which it really isn’t any more than searching for stuff on YouTube is a “game”) makes it hard to really get into it properly. It is possible to spoil the entire plot of the game within five minutes, and a lot of the videos end up feeling a lot like filler, especially when viewed out of context.
    1.0
  • Removed Gamer
    Gamer has been removed
    2 2 3
    Her Story is an interactive FMV game where you take on the role of an (initially) unknown person who is sifting through video footage at a police station. Throughout the duration of the game, you sift through a little over 300 video clips of several interviews from 1994 of a British woman named Hannah, who is overly obsessed with fairy tales. By the end of the clips, the player will have a full understanding of what event had transpired, and also who they are within the game.

    I'll admit, the main selling point of this title for me was the fact that it was made by Sam Barlow. I'm a huge Silent Hill fan, although Shattered Memories is far from my favorite. Unfortunately, Her Story does not live up to even a fraction of the hype that has surrounded it since its release date in 2015, nor has it lived up to the potential of Sam Barlow. The title is little more than a glorified movie on Steam, masked as an FMV game. "But Splattered Brains, it's full motion video you idiot!" you may say, and I get that; I've played my share of FMV games, emphasis on the word game. Her Story barely qualifies as an FMV game, and the content that you acquire for the price is not justified.

    You will begin Her Story with no direction on where to go or how to play. Basically, you will type "keywords" into a search bar to load up videos of the several interviews that are present. The title limits you to only having access to 5 videos at a time, so you must either delete or modify the keywords in order to filter them out of a certain search term. However, this only true game play element is voided by the fact that you can access every single video in the database by using the keyword "blank", and it's easy to figure this out early on. Once you're done watching every single video clip, which range anywhere from 1 second in length to 2 and a half minutes, the game is over.

    Yes, so once you've watched the whole movie within the game, the game itself is over. There's no piecing together evidence to try and convict this woman of murder, there's nothing else at all. The "add to session" feature, which will add clips of your choosing to a timeline of events bar, is completely useless and unnecessary; it's only there to try and make the player feel like they have something to accomplish when they actually don't. This game is being marketed as a "detective" game, but you do not even play as a detective; nor are you solving any crimes or mystery! A good half, or maybe even more, of the video clips are useless, even in terms of building a character-audience relationship.

    The more I think about it, the more I honestly feel like I was scammed by Her Story. I paid for a detective game, not a glorified movie with a search box that will give you every single video off of one keyword. The title literally has no point whatsoever, other than making it to the end of the clips; to which the entire plot is ultimately revealed with a slight twist. I will give the title this, though, the main actress does a fantastic job. That is the only positive thing that I can take from Her Story. Beware the hype and positive reviews, purchase now if you want a 2 hour movie.

    Join my Steam review group:
    http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bhhreviews
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